How do companies like this even survive past their first year? From the story at least, it sounds like anything that could lead to a profitable product first gets slowed down by terrible hardware, then by ridiculous adherence on minor aesthetic details (without a clear guide on what is expected. I mean, are they expecting #f0f purple, or #707 purple?) only to finally get killed because suitable tools are banned and entirely unusable tools are put in their place.

Sounds like my old history teacher, who would have a go at you if you put the title on the top line of the page and the name and date in the upper corners, expected a new day's work to not begin on a new page if there were three empty lines left at the bottom of yesterday's work, and woe betide you if you drew a diagram in pen. And much like Sebastian, I too quit as soon as I could.

As to how the company survives, it's quite easy to hypothesize. They have a passable product created by a team six or seven years ago. Other companies bought into the product and, over time, it became a part of their legacy systems, which continue to work--or at least drag along--to this day. As the original developers have moved on and documentation, if it was even produced in the first place, is missing, no one wants to touch those systems or can justify the cost to their managers of replacing a system that seems to work just fine. Besides, there are always more "important" projects to work on.

Sebastian's now former employer then went on to create a few new products. This is what Sebastian was tasked with. Between the project aforementioned and the one Sebastian worked on, new management and staff had been brought in over time due to employee churn. New management can talk the talk, sell ideas well, shift blame, and are praised for their attention to detail (such as consistent heading colors), so they stay in control--and employed. The reality they see does not necessarily have to reflect the actual reality, hence the belief in their libraries. Perhaps management heard C++ libraries were wonderful, they directed some employees not knowledgeable in C++ to use C++, and by some magic of just issuing a directive to create wonderful C++ libraries, they now have them.

"This job was destined to be like any other, full of annoying coworkers, poorly thought out requirements, legacy codebases full of spaghetti. But it paid well, and he was tired of his old group, weary in his soul of the same faces he'd grown accustomed to."

@First paragraph was the WTF: Sadly, to a certain extent, I'd have to say that the key WTF in that first paragraph hides in that word "he".

Once again, the victim of an apparent WTF is seen to have done it to himself.

Seriously, folks, unless you hate your co-workers with a passion that burns with the fire of a thousand suns, don't use them as a reason to quit your job. And no, "weary in his soul" doesn't qualify as such a passion.

He kind of did do it to himself. Some very reasonable questions to ask in a job interview:

"Can you show me the kind of machines that you do development on?"

"Can you show me some of the work that I might be doing? I'd like to get a sense of how day-to-day life would be around here."

"Can you lay out your design process for me?"

The first question would have him run screaming from the interview after seeing the Vista machine. The second would have alerted him to the ridiculous design requirements, or the requirement to use C++. The third would have told him all he needed to know to decline the position. Unless the company you are hired by was downright fraudulent during the interview, any person who takes a job with so many clear failings is, at least partially, responsible for it.

Vista made me feel the luckiest person on the planet. I had absolutely none of those mysterious crashes and lockups and instant black-hole formations that everybody else seemed to be getting on a daily basis. Sure, it was dog slow, but so is every version of Windows after XP if you install Avast Antivirus on it. But otherwise, it was fine.

How many of those users that got crashy Vista installed drivers and system software from the XP era, despite clear warnings they should not do it?

This is why Microsoft is scared of making any architectural changes to Windows at the kernel level. A "Vista" moment was imminent no matter what MS did because they had to get rid of some of the nastier old features of the NT kernel which everyone insisted on using (which in turn were introduced to make NT partially compatible with Windows 9x).

Some years after, when everybody had retooled, the marketing department took Vista Platform Update version, added some UI tweaks to make it look faster and a new transparent bar, and they came up with Windows 7. Everybody loved it and praised it's ability to run Vista drivers flawlessly while Vista broke with XP drivers. Mmm... okay

Addendum 2017-01-11 10:31:
Clarification: Yes I used the Vista-compatible version of Avast, but that company never managed to make their AV fast in Vista or any subsequent version of Windows.

I didn't have problems with Vista either, other than by now I've given up on Windows Update (my last successful attempt had three days of continuous 100% churning on one of my cores, while I gave up my latest attempt after about a week of such).

Oh, and Visual 2013 not being compatible with it, which was why I got a new, non-Vista computer.

I have had this kind of problem before. Artists including some random paid for font or something.

It's bad enough to just not use defaults. These fonts though also are chosen purely on aesthetics. If you want to go i18n then don't expect them to be particularly exhaustive when it comes to code page coverage.

I ended up just avoiding most problems this way of that. A common one is with the font weight. It gets worse when you find it renders significantly differently on a different OS/Browser. I managed to get away with editing only one thing which was one of the baselines or something.

In future anything else I'm just replacing the font. In this case fixing the font bugs in the font render is stupid. If he had a good python fix though he should have just tried to out put that to a new font without the errors.

You assume they would have been honest. Another thing these types of companies are great at is sounding like hip, cutting edge places specifically to avoid people dropping the interview and walking out

I had to do a system restore a Win 8.1 tablet because a recommended Intel driver update, after installing, turned it 95% of the way to a brick. Touchscreen did not work, volume control did not work, no way to attach a keyboard or mouse, even the power button didn't do anything unless you held it in (Device-level power-off). Finally found a boot-up sequence that would allow me to restore to an initial state, albeit with all of my data still on the tablet.

I think it took a total of four days full uptime, plugged in like you would your phone, before Microsoft Update reported out what updates I could install. Not to download and install, just the scan itself. Microsoft had such a raging hard-on to move people to Windows 10 that I think it's quite likely they intentionally made it painful to those that wanted to stay. Just like game designers nowadays have pain points to 'encourage' you to pay a dollar here, a hundred there to play something that wasn't designed with fun as the first bullet on the list.

I remember Sebastian. He had a piss-poor attitude from day one. That's why we decided to test his mettle. Obviously he failed miserably. And if he had bothered to meet any of his new team, they would have gladly shown him the ample documentation on our code library. But no, he had to hide away in his precious private office.

I'm sure glad we stuck him with the derelict parking stall back by the loading bay. That was a clerical error, which I would have corrected if there was any hope he'd turn out.

I recently went through the same thing with win-7; turns out there was an update to windows update, without which it would hang in the scan. Once you updated win-update, you could do the scan relatively quickly, but had to manually hide the updates for win-10 (several of them) before installing. And for bonus fun, if you auto installed updates, then they hid those win-10 updates as optional, but if you manually installed updates, then the win-10 stuff showed up as mandatory.

Yep, reminds me of when I went in to interview at a job that was supposed to predominantly SQL w/ some c# work... I asked a lot of questions while I was there... and lo and behold... old machines, VB 6 code for GUIs in cut and paste fashion, no SQL, and one of my main interviewers was a sys admin. The developer seemed absent minded, the manager had no clue what was going on, and seemed lost and stumbled over anything I asked him about.

Pretty obvious choice there... Stay jobless, go for the next opportunity.
Was jobless for another week... then ended up interviewing at another place, getting a great gig I stayed at for YEARS.

Reminds me of a bad job that I had with a distributor. They grilled me on C#, ASP.NET, SQL, etc during the interview. Then I show up for work and they're in the middle of converting some ancient FoxPro-type system to Dynamics (the version with X++). Actually, the contracting company in Colorado was making some kind of framework in Dynamics that I guess eventually the on-site team was supposed to do something with? Really difficult getting a straight answer out of anybody. I remember spending a week documenting how to install products like Visual Studio and Office. Otherwise, I had fuck all to do most days. Some days I literally just speedwalked around the building all day. I even found a way to get between the walls but I didn't have a smartphone so the novelty of that wore off quickly. Anyway, the day after I signed up for health insurance, they let me go because they were "disturbed" that I hadn't turned any work in. Hard to do if I don't have any work to do, chief. They were also really upset over the day that I called off because there was 4-5 feet of snow and the governor closed the entire city. Even if I could've gotten out of my driveway, WTF would've been the point?

The worst thing about places like that is having to explain them at future interviews. As you tell people this stuff, it sounds crazy. Who would seriously hire people and manage them this way? But it happens. And you have to stand up for yourself because you'll be God-damned it they're going to have the last laugh.

Still running it on my home machine, 10 years (?) on (I lose track). Only problem is Google updates are no longer supported on it. It runs perfectly, never had a problem with it. You can stick your Windows 7, 8, 10, la la la la up Bill Gates's arse where it belongs.

Maybe its your system or setup? There are lots of Avast 'features' that you should probably not have enabled. That said, I've run Avast on lots of different systems, and they hardly perform dog slow. I've run many AV and have never noticed it to be any slower than other decent AV. I've certainly seen slow AV though, McAfee and Norton were both pretty crap back when I used to run them.

Maybe its your system or setup? There are lots of Avast 'features' that you should probably not have enabled. That said, I've run Avast on lots of different systems, and they hardly perform dog slow. I've run many AV and have never noticed it to be any slower than other decent AV. I've certainly seen slow AV though, McAfee and Norton were both pretty crap back when I used to run them.

There are lots of Avast 'features' that you should probably not have enabled.

It's probably the “scan every file on opening for read” that is really killing things. Turned that off (though in a different AV product) on a colleague's laptop yesterday and accelerated the disk access speed by a factor of about 10,000.